


Where Vanished Objects Go

by Demonfeathers



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-13
Updated: 2016-03-18
Packaged: 2018-05-26 10:12:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,337
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6234622
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Demonfeathers/pseuds/Demonfeathers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>All the atoms that were them, they’ve gone into the air and the wind and the trees and the earth and all the living things. They’ll never vanish. They’re just part of everything.<i></i></i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Why am I yet to see heartbreaking daemon fics in this fandom do I have to do everything myself  
> Part one of at least two, I think. Next part will have Frisk.

Asterion flows through forms like snow on the wind, moving from one constellation configuration to the next without stopping. He is a scorpion twitching into a rabbit leaping into an eagle which swoops tightly around them, ruffling fur and hair and clothes before coming down as a hound mid-run, who skids to a halt and flares his wings as a swan, arch and proud, long neck curving into a snake that slithers through the grass and winds up Chara’s leg to their shoulder where he settles as a crow, one dark eye on Asriel who is laughing and clapping with delight.

“That’s so cool! I wish I could change shapes like that!”

Chara ducks their head and turns their face to Aster’s feathers, hiding a smile.

Their mother calls them all inside for lunch.

 

Asriel has asked them about the outside world. He wants to know about humans, about the wide open spaces outside the mountain and the people that live there. Instead, Chara tells him about the stars.

“It’s like looking at the ceiling of the caves in Waterfall. All these bright points of light, glittering in the darkness above you, but it’s different too. In Waterfall you can feel the ceiling there, even if you can’t see it. The air is different, sound travels different. It’s dark but you can tell it’s not that far away, no matter how high the ceilings are. The stars aren’t like that. You can feel the distance, when you look up at the night sky. Everything is open and endless and after looking up long enough, it stops feeling like you’re looking up at something and more like you’re the one stuck to the ceiling, looking down, except there’s no floor, just this endless drop into nothing with the stars spread out through it.”

“How can you feel like you’re looking down if you’re looking up? That’s silly.”

“Well, you might as well be. Looking down is the same as looking up, when it comes to the stars.”

“Whaaat? That doesn’t make any sense. Chara, you’re making fun of me!”

“Am not. It’s true. The Earth is round, so if I stood on one side of the Earth and looked up at the sky, and you stood on the other side and did the same thing, we’d be looking in opposite directions. But we’d both be looking up. So that means we’d both be looking down, too.”

“That’s so weird. Looking up and down at the same time?”

“Yep.”

“Huh. That’s kinda cool. Hey Chara? Do you think we could go to the stars someday? They seem pretty cool.”

“…Probably not. They’re really far away. So far away that the light they give off takes years and years to get to Earth. All the stars could be dead by now, and we wouldn’t know it because it takes so long for the light to get here.”

“Aww, don’t say that! I’m wanna see the stars someday. When we get out of here, let’s go to the top of the mountain together and watch the stars. They’d better still be there, ‘cause I wanna see them with you!”

“I’m sure the stars will still be there, Azzy. We’ll watch them together. I promise.”

 

Asterion does not help Chara eat the buttercups, but he doesn’t stop them, either. Chara strokes his head and murmurs to him until their fingers are too stiff to bend and their lips are cracked and bleeding. Then then just lay there, in their little bed with its hand-knit quilt and soft pillow, all for them, and breath together. Asriel falters when Aster starts shedding little puffs of golden dust when he moves, but Chara convinces him to keep smuggling them flowers.

“I promised you that we’d watch the stars together, Azzy, and we will, just not the way you thought. There are others in the Underground that want to see the stars as much as you do, I bet, and they never will if we don’t do this. We’re the hope of monsterkind, right? We have to break the Barrier. It’s not right, the way you’re all stuck down here like this.”

Asriel twists his mouth, looking sadly at Asterion, curled at the foot of the bed in one of the dog forms he’s been in for weeks now, but obediently goes to fetch more flowers.

 

“We’re going to fix it. We’re going to fix everything. It’ll be ok,” Chara whispers in the dead of night, voice raw and wrecked.

Asterion curls around their cold feet and says nothing, nothing, nothing.

 

When they die at last, they do it with their eyes open. Chara is smiling up at them all, hovering over their bed, when their eyes finally glaze over. Asterion is looking at Asriel with big mournful dog eyes as he dissolves like someone has finally hit play on a scene that’s been stuck in slow motion. Golden dust hangs in the air for a moment, about to disperse, and Asriel lunges forward and _takes_ it. He doesn’t know exactly how one goes about absorbing a soul, the one hitch in their plan, but he reaches for Asterion’s Dust and it coats his arms and face and lungs and then–

_Oh,_ Asriel thinks dizzily, looking up at his parents horrified faces on the other side of the deathbed. _So this is what it’s like._ And he stands up, a bit taller than he was before, his head a bit heavier with new horns, and is mindful of his new claws when he carefully scoops up Chara’s body. There is a golden haze over his eyes, or maybe everything just glows now and he never knew it before, but there’s no time to think about it, he has to finish the plan.

Outside the Barrier, it is nighttime, and the sky is so impossibly huge and filled with more stars than could ever be counted. Asriel sees what Chara meant now, about looking down. He almost crouches instinctively against the side of the mountain, to try and keep from falling up into that void.

“Look Chara,” he says, glancing down at the glazed eyes of the body in his arms. “We made it. We’re watching the stars together.”

 

When the villagers come, he falters, because he never had Chara’s determination, he thought he was ready to see this through but he isn’t, he can’t, oh no oh no please someone help–

He thinks he hears Asterion howling as he stumbles back through the barrier with no more souls than he left with. His ears are still ringing as he falls, crumbling in front of the throne he was meant to sit on one day.

He wonders if the stars will catch him.


	2. Interlude

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sans' POV during a bad run

Sans watches the thing that might have been a human child once as it walks down the Judgement Hall. He knows he’s been here before, even if he can’t remember it; all of his research points to this… thing, as the source of the anomaly. Timelines jumping back and forth, all of it leading nowhere good.

He’s kinda skeptical of the whole human thing. Undyne had the right of it. Whatever this thing is, it doesn’t act like any human he’s ever heard of. Mind, he’s never met a live one himself, but he’s pretty sure they’re supposed to be fairly protective of their daemons, being their physical souls and all. This thing doesn’t seem to give a rat’s ass about the daemon it’s been dragging behind it through the Underground.

On the other hand, the neither the thing-that-may-have-been-human nor the daemon itself seem to care about _anything_ , let alone each other, so–

The kid steps up in front of him, expectant, waiting, and it’s soul is a hulking mass of fur and teeth beside it. Some kind of wolf thing, he guesses, like Ice Wolf if he got a terminal illness and went batshit. It looks rabid, all bloodshot eyes and drool hanging from its jaws, and he watched this thing turn into a falcon and pluck Shyren’s head from her body and crush it like a snail. It’s fucking dangerous, whatever the hell it is, and he is so sick of his thoughts turning in these dusty circles. Best avoid it all together and do what he came here to do.

“let’s just get to the point.”

He opens the battle all out, throwing everything but the kitchen sink at the daemon that shifts and twists through his every attack, bird monkey rabbit bird rat wolf, lunging forward to snap at the air where he was a second ago. And on they go, never quite able to hit each other properly. The demon’s daemon turns into things he recognizes and things he doesn’t, swiping a heavy bear’s paw at him with a roar, now lunging with fangs and claws as some striped cat thing twice his size, now a huge bird with talons the length of his hand and a wickedly hooked beak. He manages to dodge them all, but just barely. He’s flagging, and he knows he can’t keep this up. Whatever that thing is, he knows it’ll just keep coming until whatever’s in front of it breaks.

He tries his last gambit, a parody of what his brother would have done. Appealing to that thing's better nature, what a joke.

But to his utter shock, the damn thing actually seems to be considering it. The daemon is in stag form, down on one knee and panting, trying to get its hooves back under itself. The antlers look sharp, and Sans eyes them nervously as the human wavers, slowly loosening its grip on the knife in its hand. It takes a step forward, and another.

Sweating, Sans opens his arms, beckons it forward, trying to look inviting as it actually… accepts? Drops the knife, and the daemon stumbles forward, suddenly a young fawn in spots without even budding antlers in place of the wicked spread it had a moment ago. It’s trembling on rail thin legs like a newborn, and the human steps forward into his arms, clinging to his jacket with what Sans would call desperation if he didn’t know better.

He’s still watching the trembling fawn as it bursts into golden Dust when he drives the bones through the human’s back, and the sight almost makes him regret it.

Almost.

 

Sans watches the thing that might have been a human child once as it walks down the Judgement Hall. He knows he’s been here before, even if he can’t remember it; all of his research points to this… thing, as the source of the anomaly. Timelines jumping back and forth, all of it leading nowhere good.

He can’t see its daemon from where he’s standing, and for a moment he wonders if the human lost it somewhere along the way, somehow. It certainly doesn’t seem as attached to its soul as you’d think it’d be, but then the daemon doesn’t talk either, so what does he know.

But there, he sees it; something is coiled over the human’s shoulders, shifting as it comes nearer. Loops of black scales unwrap from around the human’s neck and drop to the floor, growing as it goes, until by the time the human stops across from Sans there is a dragon taking up the space in between them. Sans didn’t think humans could have dragons for daemons, but then he also didn’t think a human would march through the Underground killing everything and anything in its path, so shows what he knows.

It’s huge, easily five times the human’s size. Its mouth is billowing smoke like a chimney, and its eyes are red and bloodshot. Sans can’t tell if it’s because of some repressed emotion or from the smoke it’s blowing in its own face.

Oh, who’s he kidding. This thing doesn’t have emotions.

Sans feels like he’s going to have a bad time.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An introduction to Frisk

There is a voice murmuring in the back of Frisk’s mind, and Gyre can’t hear it. It seems helpful, for the most part, describing the various monsters they encounter and reading signs that Frisk can’t make out very well. They’re all written in a sort of script that looks old and worn, but the voice seems to understand them fine. Gyre is worried that Frisk is hearing voices, but it’s not like either of them can do anything about it and they don’t trust this goat woman enough yet to mention it to her, no matter how nice she is.

Most of Gyre’s worry stems from the fact that when Frisk first woke after their fall, they called him Aster. They’re not sure why; they’ve never met a daemon with that name before. Maybe it was the voice’s daemon. Frisk wonders what happened to them.

 

Talking is doing nothing, and the voice is being unhelpfully quiet. Gyre is _hurting_ , the flames scorching feathers and fur no matter how quickly he shifts trying to dodge. Neither of them were expecting this, panicking as they try to duck and weave but often moving right into the path of the fireballs instead of out. Frisk’s throat is locked up, and they can’t bear it, can’t bear Gyre’s screeches of pain every time they fail to talk Toriel down. Something has to break.

Desperate, Frisk thinks _maybe, maybe if I just prove that I **can** fight, if I hurt her just enough but not too much, she’ll accept it, she’ll stop, she’ll let us by–_

That is not how it works. Frisk and Gyre stare down at the soft pile of dust that lies in front of the door out of the Ruins. The voice is silent. The only sound is Gyre’s harsh panting, exhaustion and the pain from his burns making him waver on his feet. He is a young fox, fur the same color of the fire she threw at them, and Frisk can’t tell if the black fur on his legs is natural coloring or soot. His snout is white with Toriel’s dust from being too close when she dissolved, and it looks like that time they tried to make cookies for their mother to surprise her with ( _look what we can do look at me look at us please look_ ) and ended up getting flour all over everything.

They did not try to make cookies again.

“I didn’t–“ Frisk croaks. “I didn’t mean–I wasn’t trying to….”

There is a long silence.

“She isn’t disappearing,” Gyre finally says, voice odd. “She turned into dust but it’s white and she’s still here. Why didn’t the dust disappear?”

He turns to look at Frisk, bewildered, and the white is around his eyes too, a mask that coats his whole face and makes him look otherworldly, ghostly.

Frisk shakes their head and curls in on themselves, crouching on the floor. They didn’t mean it, they didn’t, please, make it go away, they take it back they take it all back–

 

Toriel is throwing fireballs and Gyre is twisting and leaping between them, doing a much better job now that they aren’t caught off guard, and Frisk still doesn’t know how to stop this, but they know what not to do now, at least.

Toriel still wants them to prove they can fight. Maybe… they raise their toy knife and swing, just like last time, but this time they deliberately swing wide of the mark. Toriel frowns at the feeble attempt. They do it again, and again, and now Toriel is getting frustrated, her attacks are starting to go wide too, and it’s working, thank god.

When Toriel finally sends them on their way, Frisk and Gyre walk into the next hallway still shaken but a bit smug at having figured out how to get past. They are not expecting to see the mean flower again.

When they stumble out into the snow outside the Ruins, Gyre is no longer a fox but a mouse, trembling beneath Frisk’s sweater.

_I know what you did, I know what you did._

_You KILLED her._

The voice remains silent.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The making of a golden flower

Asriel wakes up in a strange place and a stranger body. He can see himself reflected in the gleaming metal tabletop he’s sitting on, and the last time he saw one of these flowers he was setting his best friend’s body down among them, with blisters on their lips and blank eyes.

He remembers–dying. He was dissolving into dust, sloughing off layers like dandruff every time he moved, as his human lay sick in the bed beside him. It’s like double vision. He sees the scene twice over, from his position standing beside the bed, from where he is laying tucked under Chara's arm as together their breathing slows, and slows, and–he remembers dissolving into dust, Chara's body tumbling from his arms across the throne room floor, his legs giving out and falling forward and bursting as he hit the ground, golden pollen from the flower fields mixing with his own white dust and clouding his vision as he closed his eyes for the last time, a mockery of Asterion's dust that had settled into his skin, into his bones as he gathered Chara's body close and turned for the Barrier–

Now, he looks out across the throne room from much closer to the floor than he is used to, and it is different. There is only one throne, and it sits in the middle of a field of golden flowers that make Asriel dizzy. He is falling upwards into Chara’s blank eyes, reflecting the stars as he lays them down, but this is the wrong field of flowers. There was no throne there, just spears and swords.

There is golden pollen hanging in the air, and Asriel's vision is clouded, he is sloughing golden dust across the sheets of a deathbed and he cannot breath for the phantom burning in his throat. He cannot remember who is who, for a moment, but if the dust is golden and it is not his, then it must be- "Aster?" he asks, and his voice is small and shrill and so unsure, but then he always was a crybaby, Chara said so. The sound of his own voice startles him, although not as much as the voice that answers does.

"I am not sure, little one. Your petals seem rather wide for an Aster, but you are rather too big to be a buttercup, so perhaps. I never did learn the exact genus of these flowers; I have always just called them Golden Flowers. Not the most imaginative, perhaps, but it gets the job done. Now, is there anything I can do to help you, little one?"

Asriel stares, up and up at _~~Father~~_ King Asgore, standing beside the throne with a watering can, staring curiously at him, and he starts to laugh.

He laughs, doubling over, and at first the King smiles a bit bemusedly at him but that fades when the laughter doesn't stop, it just goes and goes and it doesn't sound very happy, really, the longer it goes, and he has just set down the watering can and is reaching forward in concern when the strange flower suddenly pulls itself underground and disappears. When it becomes apparent it isn't coming back, the King sets the matter from his mind and goes back to watering his flowers, whatever they may be. They are all he has left of his children, after all; they deserve all the care he can give them.

 

The first time someone asks Asriel what his name is, he stumbles over the first syllable and chokes on his Ts and Rs, while the other monster looks confused. “Flowey,” he eventually manages to say, strained. “I’m Flowey the Flower.”

 (It is not long after this, that Flowey first discovers his ability to reset. Determination is not always a good thing to have, he has learned.)

(He thinks he knows, now, why Chara climbed the mountain. It was not a very happy reason.)


End file.
